Companions: Fifty Years of Doctor Who Assistants (31 page)

Her nitro-9 is further advanced when she develops neo-nitro, small white spheres that are activated with saliva, and later the nitro-9a smart bombs.

In
Time and Time Again
(
DWM
issue #207)
while searching for the Key to Time, Ace finds herself in a sword fight with the Third Doctor, and encounters Adric during a fancy dress party at Cranliegh Hall (from
Black Orchid
); Adric tries to make a move on her, and she warns him to stop or he will end up limping away.

In
Birthright
we see the template for what will become a regular feature in
Doctor Who
from 2006 – the Doctor-lite story. In this book, Ace and Bernice have an adventure in Victorian London while the Doctor is off elsewhere. At the end of this adventure, when they see the Doctor again, he claims to have spent the entire time in one of the TARDIS’ rooms, but neither women trust him. This distrust of the Doctor is potent enough to feed the Garvond in
The Dimension Riders
, a creature that lives off fear, hate and suspicion. She realises just how much the Doctor stood between her and Robin and then Jan, and remains only to one-up the Doctor. In
No Future
, she totally fails to charm Danny Pain, the front man of ‘70s punk band,
Plasticine,
which frustrates her – she is not used to being rejected like that. They encounter the Monk (whose name is revealed to be Mortimus), and he offers to take Ace back and save Jan, trying to steal her from the Doctor. Ace refuses, and sides with the Doctor despite her distrust of him. She cheats time and prevents the Brigadier from dying in 1976. We also learn that she often feels like killing herself and she only drinks to make herself feel vulnerable.

In
First Frontier
Ace finally gets to have her second round with the Master, who has used Tzun nanites to remove his corrupted Trakenite DNA (he has been living in a half-Trakenite body since he merged with Tremas in
The Keeper of Traken
) and restore his Time Lord regenerative cycle. Still infected by the Cheetah Planet (
Survival
), Ace is able to detect the Master, and she shoots him in the back, unintentionally causing him to regenerate – an act that wipes out the Master’s connection with the Cheetah Planet. At this point she is almost twenty-seven. In
Falls the Shadows
the Doctor and Ace discuss the way she has become hardened since she left him; he is worried about her but she tells him that nothing touches her, and he responds that ‘it should’. Despite her bravado, as soon as he is gone, Ace retreats to her room and cries for hours. We also discover that she was born in 1970, which means she must have left Earth fairly early in 1987, before her seventeenth birthday.

Ace finally leaves in
Set Piece
, and remains behind in 1870s France (as first revealed in the novelisation of
The Curse of Fenric
), and we discover it was during her time there that the painting found in Windsor Castle in 1988 (
Silver Nemesis
) was commissioned. She decides to remain to keep an eye on the time rifts, and defend the Commune to save more lives. She takes one of Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart’s time hoppers. The Doctor, having taken a look at Ace’s timeline, always knew this would happen. The Doctor, shortly after, meets a thirty-seven-year-old Ace who is being courted by Count Sorin, the grandfather of Captain Sorin from
The Curse of Fenric
. In
Head Games
it is explicitly stated that the only companions the Seventh Doctor travelled with are Mel, Ace, Bernice, Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester, thereby setting this range completely apart from the Big Finish stories that introduce other companions. Ace’s time hopper cannot take her any further than 2001, however in
Happy Endings
she visits Cheldon Bonniface, 2010, for Bernice’s wedding to Jason Kane and sleeps with a clone of Jason (later leaving with him). She is reunited with her mother, and Robin, and finally makes her peace with Audrey, promising to visit more often. By this point she is known as Dorothée Sorina-McShane, although she and Count Sorin are no longer together, and they only pretended to be married. She is thirty-one, six years younger than in
Set Piece
when she was being courted by the count – an apparent contradiction. She returns one final time in
Lungbarrow
, the final
New Adventure
for the Seventh Doctor, and discovers that the Doctor originally wanted to enrol her in the Time Lord Academy on Gallifrey (a reference to the intent of the production team had
Doctor Who
continued on television in 1990 – see
Ace’s Timeline #2: The Big Finish
). At this point she hasn’t seen the Doctor for a year, and still totally believes in him. They depart company as close as they ever were, although both a lot older and wiser.

Ace’s Timeline #2: The Big Finish

The loosely linked pentalogy of books comprising
Illegal Alien
,
Matrix, Storm Harvest, Prime Time
and
Loving the Alien
cover a lot of ground for Ace, and it is quite clearly an Ace that has only recently lived through the television story,
Survival
. Indeed, by the second book it is revealed that it has been several months since she and the Doctor left Perivale – immediately putting it at odds with the
New Adventures
. This incompatibility is later compounded when the Master, still heavily infected by his symbiosis with the Cheetah Planet, returns in
Prime Time
, flatly contradicting events established in
First Frontier
. Throughout these books, and the other Seventh Doctor-Ace novels published by BBC Books, it is established that Ace has many sexual partners (including James Dean in
Loving the Alien!
), which doesn’t tie in with the list of sexual partners she gives in
Happy Endings
, at which point we discover that Ace lost her virginity to Glitz (at some point prior to
Dragonfire
) and never slept with anyone else until Jan in
Love and War,
after which she left the Doctor for three years. Placing these books in Timeline #2 is relatively easy, for the purposes of this chapter, because
Prime Time
references the audio play
The Genocide Machine
, and
Dust Breeding
is an audio play set shortly after the novel Storm Harvest.

In
Illegal Alien
we see an Ace who still has her trust in the Doctor, and has never used a shotgun. This is also her first encounter with Nazis (thus contradicting
Timewyrm: Exodus
), and she still uses the ghetto blaster built for her by the Doctor in
Silver Nemesis
. She is pushed to her limits in
Matrix
by the Valeyard, the Doctor’s dark future incarnation first introduced in
The Trial of a Time Lord
, when he mentally corrupts her into a semi-Cheetah Person. She becomes feral and eats raw meat and blood, and later confronts a full-Cheetah Person version of herself.

In
Storm Harvest
she makes it clear that she has been travelling with the Doctor for three years, but not for much longer; since in
Prime Time
the Doctor learns that Ace is due to die at some point in the near future. He digs up her coffin to confirm that it is Ace as she appears now. Obsessed with discovering how she died, the Doctor and Ace visit 1959 in
Loving the Alien
. She is shot in the head by a man called George Limb. The Doctor is unable to save her, and at her autopsy he discovers that she was pregnant with James Dean’s baby. The Doctor ends up travelling with an alternative version of Ace who is hardly any different from the original (as later revealed
Ace’s death [and that of Sarah in
Bullet Time
and Mel in
Heritage
] is a part of the Council of Eight’s war against the Doctor).

In
The Fearmonger
we see Ace is willing to give her life up for the Doctor; when she is convinced he is host to the Fearmonger, she would rather blow them both up than allow the Fearmonger to carry on turning the Doctor into something he isn’t. But when she discovers it is actually inside her, enhancing her own fear and paranoia, she finds a way to control it and send it packing. She continues a trait she began in
Remembrance of the Daleks
, using her nitro-9 to dispatch several Daleks in
The Genocide Machine
. They create a duplicate of Ace to help them secure the Library on Kar-Charrat, but water-based inhabitants of the planet short out the duplicate before it can do any real damage. Once again she is pitted against the Master, in
Dust Breeding
, who has had his Trakenite body destroyed by a device called the Warp Core resulting in his returning to his skeletal form last seen in
The Keeper of Traken
, and further drifting from the
New Adventures
timeline. She impresses the prisoners of
Colditz
so much that they go on protests for her. Her loathing for Nazis comes to the fore once again, but seeing the death of Kurtz inside the TARDIS shakes her up so much that she decides it is time for her to grow up and get away from the Ace persona. From this point on she decides she is going to be known as McShane.

Just as she is reeling from the death she has seen, and attempting to become an adult, the Doctor takes her to Ibiza and a fateful meeting with a young man called Liam McShane, in
The Rapture
. Once again we learn that Ace was born in 1970, only this time we’re told it was on 20th August (the real world birthday of Ace actress, Sophie Aldred), which further suggests she left 1987 relatively early in the year. Liam is Ace’s younger brother by four years – he was taken from her life by their father, Harry, while Ace was in playschool, after he discovered that Audrey was having an affair with Harry’s best friend, Jack. This flies in the face of everything established in the
New Adventures
, where there isn’t any mention of Ace’s siblings, despite the sheer amount of background covered in those books. Ace promises to visit Liam again one day, after initially trying to deny him and their past.

A new companion is introduced in
The Harvest
in the shape of Thomas Hector Schofield, or Hex as he likes to be known. He is a nurse at St Gart’s Brookside Hospital, London in 2021. He and Ace immediately strike up a good friendship, and he refuses to call her ‘McShane’, preferring Ace. We learn that she always aced the multiple-choice tests at school (presumably from where her nickname was derived?), and she has been with the Doctor for ‘a surprisingly long time’. By
Live 34
she has reverted back to being called Ace, deciding that it is the name that is ‘her’. It also suggests that she is now in her mid-to-late-twenties. Another titbit of information drifts through when we find out that her Nan, Kathleen, died in 1973 when Ace was only three years old. By the time of
The Settling
Hex has found himself drawn to Ace in a romantic way, and although if Ace notices she doesn’t reciprocate, in
No Man’s Land
she points out that she considers the Doctor and Hex her only family. In
Enemy of the Daleks
Ace shows an unusual amount of tactical and military knowledge, which is more in keeping with her
New Adventures
persona than the version that has been developing in the audio plays.

Things come full circle for Ace in
Gods and Monsters
with the return of Fenric, who has been manipulating events for a while. Fenric reveals that Ace becoming one of his wolves was pure chance, a flip of a coin, and it could have easily been a ‘lovelorn motorcyclist from Wales’ (an allusion to Ray from
Delta and the Bannermen
, a contender for replacement companion in season twenty-four). Fenric takes Ace back to Perivale, to the day she originally left, and offers her a chance to change history, but she doesn’t take it. In a final confrontation, Fenric possesses a dying Hex, but he is surprised by the faith Hex has in his dead mother. In turn Ace has faith in Hex, further weakening Fenric’s hold. Hex, intent on sacrificing himself to stop Fenric, asks Ace to open the TARDIS doors so he can throw himself into the time vortex. Ace will not do it, and has to be held back by Sally Morgan while Captain Lysandra Aristides complies. Ace is shocked by this, and refuses to be comforted by anyone; not even by the Doctor. ‘Just… don’t say anything, Professor. I don’t want to hear another word.’

That is the last we hear of Ace in the ongoing Big Finish range, for now. But she does return in a short series of stories based on scripts that would have been part of season twenty-seven had
Doctor Who
continued into 1990. This season, called
The Lost Stories
, comprises
Thin Ice, Crime of the Century, Animal
and
Earth Aid
. The range was overseen by Andrew Cartmel, script editor of
Doctor Who
from 1987 to 1989, and it followed the basic plan of the proposed season twenty-seven, by introducing a new companion in the shape of Raine Creevy. The only plot line not picked up for this series of audios, though, is the Doctor’s intent to enrol Ace into the Time Lord Academy, which is how Ace would have been written out in 1990.